Book Kits & Other Reading Resources

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness challenges the conventional wisdom that with the election of Barack Obama as president, our nation has triumphed over race. Segregation, or Jim Crow, laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an astounding percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a permanent, second-class status, much like their grandparents before them who lived under an explicit system of racial control. Alexander argues that the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African American men, primarily through the War on Drugs, has created a new racial under-caste – a group of people defined largely by race that is subject to legalized discrimination, scorn, and social exclusion.

First published in 1958, The Wall Between is Anne Bradens’s first-person account of her and her husband Carl’s decision in 1954 to purchase a home in an all-white neighborhood for Andrew and Charlotte Wade, who were black, and of the explosive consequences. The book was a finalist for the 1958 National Book Award in the nonfiction category.